I just got back from a conference where I met a former student who now teaches at his alma mater, Peking University, and he had an interesting take on this. Bearing in mind this is a biased view, he thought the author, Qian Qichen, was pretty full of himself and just wrote it on his own--he's at a high enough level that he wouldn't need to get Politburo approval to publish an opinion piece. His evidence for his relatively low estimate of Qian is: (1) he is the first Chinese foreign minister to write his memoirs, (2) he is the only one who took a second post upon retiring, that of dean of the school of international politics at Peking U (his dean). (Zhu Rongji was once planning to become dean of the business school at Tsinghua but got shamed out of it.) I asked him about this before the election, so it wasn't yet expedient to disavow the piece.

--Best, LD

¶ 11/04/2004 04:00:00 PM